


When It's Time to Live and Let Die

by ativanpire



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Implied/Referenced Suicide, POV Ben Hargreeves, Slight gore?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-05
Updated: 2019-11-05
Packaged: 2021-01-23 12:36:45
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 587
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21320305
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ativanpire/pseuds/ativanpire
Summary: Emo is back but Ben is still dead.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 11





	When It's Time to Live and Let Die

**Author's Note:**

> please see tags for warnings.

I check my body for bruises that aren't there. Anymore. I place my hand over a heart that doesn't beat, trying to calm a phantom pulse. There's a tightness in my chest that a deep breath won't eliminate. I don't need to breathe. I can feel cold air inside me but not just in my lungs. It's everywhere, moving through me, more cutting than crisp. It's still dark if I close my eyes though. I should be able to see through my eyelids like I can see through the rest of me but I think the darkness is a remembered response. Close your eyes, hide in the dark. If I can't see you, you can't see me. If I can't see you, why can I still feel your warm blood seeping into my clothes and dripping into my shoes? Why can I still hear your screams?

Klaus can see me. Whether he wants to or not. I've never asked whether he wants to see his dead brother all the time and he's never indicated otherwise. I don't think this is about what we want. And why should it be? Neither one of us signed up for this. Maybe haunting him is a need or a duty. Maybe he just needs someone to bear witness. Someone who can remember the ways he hurts himself and validate them. Someone who can step in and tell him it's enough, he's hurt himself enough, and he's allowed to stop. But I can't tell him when he's suffered enough for the crime of being himself in all his fractured stained glass glory. He wouldn't believe me. I can't absolve him. I'm a ghost, not an angel. Just his luck that he'd get a ghost stalker instead of a guardian angel. I should tell him that; he'd laugh. Wear it like a badge of honor. Lacking a biological father, abandoned by an adoptive father, and ignored by a heavenly one. 

You could go cry to mom about it but mom is a robot who records your weakest moments to be played back in some dark room. We know. We tried. She just smiled her uncanny smile and checked us for bruises. Which were there. Did breathing exercises to calm our hummingbird heartbeats. And told us our father was a good man. Later, we would watch the grainy black and white footage of our own tearstreaked faces and learn that things can always get worse. But not for me, not anymore. Klaus still cries and makes things worse. I can't. Cry, that is. Not the way I used to. Now, crying is something I do with my whole not-body, a prickly sensation of getting blurry at the edges. Like static.

Klaus could probably describe it better. Sometimes I wish he were dead and I was the one hurting myself. Layering bruises and cuts on top of old scars and taking credit for my own pain. Working the delicate embroidery of needle tracks up my arms and between my fingers. Destruction is its own form of creation. It's playing chicken with whoever wants to hurt you and hurting yourself first to win. You flinched. I win. If this is what I'm willing to do to myself what do you think I'd be willing to do to you? It's a backhanded threat, a hostage situation where you're both hostage and hostage-taker. And that's where I'll always have Klaus beat. If I'm willing to kill myself, what do you think I'd be willing to do to you?


End file.
